Allentown Diocese is reaching out to inactive Catholics

Bishop Barres says the time is ripe for reaching out to inactive Catholics.

March 30, 2013|By Daniel Patrick Sheehan and Bill Landauer, Of The Morning Call

Most Catholic churches experience that biannual miracle known as the multiplication of parishioners, whereby pews that go unfilled Sunday after Sunday are suddenly crowded at Christmas and Easter.

Naturally, church leaders would prefer that the twice-a-year visitors come to Mass all year. But the major holidays at least give them the chance to encourage people to recommit to the faith. The greater challenge is connecting to Catholics who, for varied and sometimes painful reasons, no longer come to church at all.

But with the election of Pope Francis, the Diocese of Allentown sees a prime opportunity to reach out to lapsed Catholics and bring them back into the fold. The Argentine Jesuit — the first non-European elected to the papacy in 1,300 years, and the first ever from the Western Hemisphere — stirred immediate excitement with his evident humility and down-to-earth ways.

"Everywhere I go, people are flying high about him," said Bishop John O. Barres, leader of 270,000 Catholics in the five-county diocese. "I think people are attracted by his joy, by his humor."

Even before Francis, the diocese had been engaged in a formal effort to reach out to its fallen-away population, encouraging each parishioner to ask an inactive Catholic back to Mass. Barres launched the initiative to coincide with the Year of Faith called by Pope Benedict XVI in October, and spoke at length about it at a Mass after Francis' election.

Is it working?

No one can really say, because the diocese isn't tracking the numbers of new parishioners who have responded to the call. But Catholics form a massive group on the American scene.

According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, Roman Catholics comprise the largest single religious group in the United States, about 55 million. If lapsed Catholics were classed as a denomination, they would be the second-largest, at 22.5 million.

Bringing them back is a challenge, but Barres thinks the time is ripe. Beyond the worldwide attention on Francis, social media — especially Twitter and Facebook, both of which the diocese uses — can reach people like never before.

"Pope John Paul II said our faith only grows and expands when you bring it to others," the bishop said.

Falling away

Reasons for leaving the church are as different as the people who leave.

In recent years, many have moved away from Catholicism and other organized churches into the category of "spiritual, not religious." The Pew Forum says the unaffiliated — the so-called "nones" — have increased from just more than 15 percent to just less than 20 percent of all U.S. adults in the past five years.

Others over the past decade have departed the Catholic Church over the exposure of widespread sexual abuse of children by clerics. How, they wonder, can a church that claims the authority of Christ himself in teaching faith and morals have sheltered and protected predators?

The scope of the abuse problem began to come to light in 2002. The dark decade that followed cost the church deeply, in authority and in numbers.

A 2011 study by Daniel M. Hungerman, an economist at the University of Notre Dame, concluded that some 2 million American Catholics had left in reaction to the revelations, in many cases for Baptist churches and other vastly dissimilar traditions. The church has spent more than $2 billion settling abuse claims in the last decade.

Since 2002, eight priests in the Allentown diocese have been removed or resigned over abuse allegations.

Barres' predecessor, Bishop Edward Cullen, was praised by law enforcement officials around the diocese for his forthright handling of abuse investigations. He allowed the district attorneys in the five counties — Lehigh, Northampton, Schuylkill, Carbon and Berks — to review the personnel files of two dozen accused priests.

However, Cullen was named prominently in a 2005 grand jury report on cover-ups in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, where he had served under the late Cardinal Anthony Bevilacqua. Cullen was portrayed as a key player in a bureaucracy that often turned a blind eye to abuse complaints and shuffled known and suspected predators from parish to parish.

In a 2011 grand jury report, also concerning events in the Philadelphia archdiocese, Cullen was accused of helping protect a priest who went on to rape a 10-year-old boy. Cullen denied the allegation.

Barres, who succeeded Cullen in 2009, acknowledged the depth of the anguish caused by the scandal and said the diocese, and the church at large, must follow the example of John Paul II, now known as Blessed John Paul II as he advances on the path to sainthood.

"Blessed John Paul gave us that great example of apologizing for the church's sins in history," Barres said, "and we apologize at the deepest level."

The church has taken a series of steps meant to prevent abuse from happening again, Barres added, from changes in reporting procedures to establishment of youth protection programs.